Accenture Highly Sensitive Data Exposed On S3

“Compromised passwords and keys are one of the most common attack vectors exploited by the adversaries. Enterprises need to have visibility into how exposed or vulnerable they are to this attack vector. Predictive breach-risk platforms can provide organizations with a view into how safe their password practices are – including weak, default or no passwords on their business-critical assets. These types of solutions can also alert organizations about passwords for critical assets that are being exchanged unencrypted.”

“It doesn’t take much for outsiders – malicious or not – to find unsecured data servers such as the four that housed Accenture’s data. Where data is publicly accessible because of misconfiguration of a service like AWS, outsiders don’t need a password or the ability to crack complex encryption to get at sensitive information.

It could be argued that any of these misconfigurations or accidental uploads could have been avoided with basic security best practices such as limiting access from outside the corporate network, encrypting highly sensitive data, and training employees on security risks.”

“The spate of recent data exposure incidents are shining a bright light on the extent to which administrators lack understanding of how to secure their S3 buckets in the cloud. Storing sensitive data in the cloud without putting in place appropriate systems and practices to manage the security posture is dangerous, especially for an organization like Accenture. A misconfiguration oversight can potentially expose private data to the world and put an organization’s reputation at risk. There are now tools that help companies find and fix these completely avoidable misconfigurations, which makes these security gaps all the more egregious.”